What the Bo Xilai Trial Means for China’s Legal System

The sentencing of former Chongqing Communist Party boss Bo Xilai to life in prison on bribery charges over the weekend effectively brought to a close China’s biggest political crisis since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. Bo’s exit is significant in that it leaves the neo-Maoist “New Left” without a star. But the trial was also noteworthy for the many questions it raised about the future of China’s much-scrutinized legal system.

The trial of Bo, presided over by the Jinan Intermediate People’s Court in eastern China’s Shandong province, caught many off guard with its apparent openness. While politically sensitive trials have typically been cloaked in secrecy, the proceedings in the Bo trial were broadcast online in unusual detail through the court’s official feed on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

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Bo Xilai during his sentencing on Sept. 22.

Many Chinese who viewed the apparent openness of the trial might now rethink deep-seated problems of the judicial process. Prominent Chinese legal scholar He Weifang noted that making public so much of the proceedings in a trial has never been done in similar cases.

Yet, as He also pointed out, it’s still not clear how much of the trial was choreographed and how much was spontaneous. Will the relative transparency of the trial—even if much of it was scripted—stimulate an increased call for similar trials in the future? Many Chinese, especially netizens, are aware that content emanating from conventional media and social media sources tied to Chinese officialdom is tightly controlled. Such expectations must color their opinions, not only of the Bo trial, but of the possibility that similar trials will be permitted in the future.

Another law professor, Tong Zhiwei of the East China University of Political Science and Law, optimistically argues that, by putting the trial on show, the Communist Party might provoke greater public support for reform of judicial procedure. He claims that the Bo trial presents a model that is supported by the “the broad masses of people” and should be implemented by the Supreme People’s Court to express the right to an open trial, and by legislation to guarantee it.

China’s top court official has made it clear that he is aware of flaws in China’s legal system

A recent article posted on the website of the Supreme People’s Court featured an interview that appeared in Seeking Truth, the journal of the Central Committee of the CCP, in which Zhou Qiang, president of the court, discussed problems confronting the courts (in Chinese). While he did not mention the Bo trial specifically, his comments touch on other major areas of the law.

In the article, summarized in English here, Zhou cites a recent statement by President Xi Jinping: “In every single legal case in China, we should work hard to ensure that the mass of the public feel that that they have received fair justice.” He specifically mentions wrongful convictions, a persistent problem that Xi addressed earlier this year. An obvious argument can be made that open and transparent trials at which witnesses were obliged to appear and be cross-examined could help prevent wrongful convictions.

Zhou mentioned three types of non-criminal cases in which “the retarded capabilities of the courts remain unchanged,” namely governments’ takings of property, environmental and internet cases. In addition to wrongful convictions, he mentions other issues involving the courts:

-Obstacles to litigation, such as court refusal to accept cases;
-Legal aid for the poor;
-Interference into court operations; and
-Localism and bureaucratic nature.

The concerns expressed are so broad that they could be part of a platform for extensive reform of the courts going forward. By the same token, lack of detail makes it impossible to guess how Zhou would implement reforms in any of these areas

There is no clear way ahead, and legal reform will only be one element in a broader debate. Yu Keping, director of the Center for Chinese Government Innovation at Peking University, writing on the need to strike a balance between economic development and “universal values,” including the rule of law, studies the most recent report by the 18th Party Congress, issued in November 2012. He finds that although there is opposition to “copying” a Western political system, it does not deny the existence of those values, including democracy and the rule of law, and states that they are “core elements of the socialist value system.” The report calls on the “whole country to actively absorb and draw lessons from the successes of foreign cultural achievements.” This temperate statement is interesting, since it appears at a time when Western legal values are being attacked.

Is China now at a crossroads, from which one path leads to a newer synthesis of political values and the other goes backward to those of Mao? The Party leaders were fortunate to be able to use legal processes to dethrone Bo and defuse the threat that he presented of initiating left-oriented change from within. Whatever else it may have been, the trial was a vital reminder that the Party still controls the law. Behind debate over the Bo trial is a more fundamental issue, as Andrew Browne of the Wall Street Journal notes: “…the question the party is confronting is whether Mr. Bo’s Chongqing represents China’s future or its past.”

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